From sensors used for environmental monitoring to collaborations with lichens to understand air pollution, as well as smart infrastructures that sense and adjust to real-time conditions, the registers and practices of sensing are shifting from an assumed human-centered set of perceiving and decoding practices, to extended entities and environments of sense. New registers of sense are becoming evident as organisms express different and dynamic ways in which environments are changing. And many of these shifts and extended registers of sense are further captured through ubiquitous computing that distributes sensing capacities across environments. Citizen sensing also constitutes a set of sensing practices that is meant to enable and empower people to sense for political effect, giving rise to questions about the politics of sense, and how sensing entities transform into agents of provocation and change.

With these developments in mind, how might it be possible to rethink and rework the practices, entities and environments of sense within this broader context, where the assumed subjects and trajectories of sense are shifting? This panel attends to questions about how sensing and practice emerge, take hold, and form attachments across environmental, material, political and aesthetic concerns. Rather than take “the senses” as a fixed starting point, this panel instead considers how sensing-as-practice is differently articulated in relation to technologies of environmental monitoring, data gathered for evidentiary claims, the formation of citizens, and more-than-human entanglements. How might these expanded approaches to sensing practices recast engagements with experience, and reconfigure explorations of practice-based research?

After hosting a year-long seminar series on “Sensing Practices” (Citizen Sense 2014-15) we are now inviting speakers to address the proliferation of sensing practices that de-center a standard human-sensing subject, and that rethink and rework the sites and entities in and through which sensing is articulated and unfolds.

Papers could explore but should not be limited to:

Environmental monitoring, apparatuses of sense, and citizen sensing

New sensing subjects and politics of sense, including comparisons and divergences of sensing practices and “affect”